At the Los Angeles’ Peacock theater last night, The Game Awards broadcast its annual mix of prize presentations and expensive video game advertisements. New titles were announced, celebrities appeared, and at one point, screaming people were suspended from the ceiling in an extravagant promotion for a new role-playing game.
Acclaimed French adventure Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 began the night with 12 nominations – the most in the event’s history – and ended it with nine awards. The Gallic favourite took game of the year, as well as awards for best game direction, best art direction, best narrative and best performance (for actor Jennifer English).
Elsewhere, Hades II took best action game, Hollow Knight: Silksong won in best action/adventure and Arc Raiders won best multiplayer. There was a decent showing for the new(ish) Nintendo Switch 2, with Donkey Kong Bananza taking best family game and Mario Kart World scorching across the line with best sports/racing game.
It was also a night of big budget video game announcements. Star Wars: Fate of the Old Republic, a spiritual successor to the classic Xbox series Knights of the Old Republic, was revealed with the original game director Casey Hudson at the helm. Developed by Arcanaut Studios, it’s a single-player narrative adventure set on the brink of major change for the galaxy.
Another returning classic was Tomb Raider, which is getting two fresh instalments – a remake of the 1996 original named Legacy of Atlantis, and a new adventure, Tomb Raider: Catalyst.
A newcomer to the Divinity series of role-playing adventures was unveiled with a frankly gross trailer. Created by Larian Studios, maker of Baldur’s Gate 3, the game was teased by Game Awards organiser Geoff Keighley who posted photos on social media showing a mysterious statue along with its coordinates in the Mojave desert.
An unexpected highlight was the lovely looking Coven of the Chicken Foot, a fantasy puzzle platformer from Wildflower Interactive, a new indie studio set up by Naughty Dog veteran Bruce Straley, who worked on both Uncharted and The Last of Us. You play an elderly witch called Gertie and a lumbering creature in what looks like an arthouse riff on The Last Guardian.
There was a new trailer for Capcom’s latest survival horror opus Resident Evil Requiem which showed the return of series favourite Leon S Kennedy, now sporting a floppy fringe and leather coat like some sort of emo super cop. He’ll be playable alongside FBI analyst Grace Ashcroft, the characters experiencing parallel adventures with different special abilities.
Among dozens of other reveals was 4:Loop, a new co-op shooter from the makers of Left 4 Dead and JJ Abrams’ Bad Robot Games, featuring eternally cloned and re-cloned warriors trying to reclaim the world from alien invasion. Ontos is a sci-fi mystery from Frictional, creator of Soma, set in a repurposed hotel on the moon. Remedy Entertainment unveiled the sequel to its acclaimed sci-fi adventure Control; named Control Resonant, it takes place in a Manhattan reshaped by an invading cosmic force. Wildlight Entertainment, a new studio from members of the Apex Legends and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare teams showed off Highguard, a free-to-play raid shooter. And Wizards of the Coast materialised with Warlock, a dark single-player action-adventure set in the Dungeons and Dragons universe.
The Game Awards is a controversial and imperfect beast. But this will be remembered as a night in which an ambitious debut game from a small French studio, with a budget of less than $10m, took all the major awards, beating vastly expensive sequels such as Death Stranding 2 and Ghost of Yōtei. In a modern games industry of billion dollar takeovers and mass redundancies, we must grasp such positives where we can.
